Ex-CIA chief Brennan compares Trump to Bernie MadoffThe HillTrump tweeted. Madoff oversaw the largest financial fraud in U.S. history, with prosecutors estimating he cheated clients out of $64.8 billion. Brennan directed the CIA from 2013-2017. Before he left the agency, he began publicly criticizing Trump’s…

For those who buy inexpensive smartphones in developing countries where privacy protections are usually low, convenience could come with a hidden cost: preloaded apps that harvest users’ data without their knowledge.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel cleared the final domestic hurdle toward limiting the influx of illegal immigrants to Germany, after her center-left coalition partner agreed to make it easier for police to expel some migrants who turn up at the border.

The majority obtained in Mexico’s Congress by the political parties supporting Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the winner of Sunday’s election, is so overwhelming that the future president is very close to the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional reforms.

Although Mr. Ames was able to elude detection for nearly nine years, those interviewed are clearly proud of their investigation’s successful conclusion. This despite a House Intelligence Committee report that has criticized the bureau’s officials for a “wait and see” approach to finding a spy who had done great damage to American intelligence.

Mr. Ames, a counterintelligence officer in the C.I.A.’s Soviet division, began providing information to the Kremlin in 1985 and continued doing so until his arrest, along with that of his wife, Rosario, at their home outside Washington last Feb. 21. Over the years, the K.G.B. and its successor agencies in Russia paid him more than $2.5 million, in exchange for which he compromised more than a hundred Western intelligence operations and in effect sent at least 10 men to their death by identifying them as agents of the West.

Mr. Ames last year pleaded guilty to spying for Moscow, and his wife pleaded guilty to a lesser espionage offense. He is serving a life sentence at a Federal prison in Allenwood, Pa. She is serving a five-year sentence in Danbury, Conn.

The F.B.I.’s involvement in the case began with a fruitless analytical effort undertaken in the late 1980’s, after two of the bureau’s premier double agents, both K.G.B. men in Washington, had been recalled by Moscow and executed. In its search for the betrayer of the two men, the F.B.I. focused on Edward Lee Howard, a junior C.I.A. officer who had defected to Moscow. But the bureau concluded that although Mr. Howard might have known the identity of one man, he had not known the identity of the other.

The search was then largely dormant until 1991, when officials of the intelligence agency told the F.B.I. of a string of operational disasters that could be explained only by the presence of a mole inside American intelligence.